Summary of the Copper Deposits of Americas

Using data compiled by Geoscience Australia, the Geological Survey of Canada and the United States Geological Survey

Author

Yuri Gomes

Published

February 23, 2023

1 On Dataset

This report brings a summary of the Americas’s Copper deposits contained in the Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative (CMMI) database CMMI is a collection of geochemical analysis of 7,000 samples from mineral deposits in 60 countries.

This report is for education and science communication only. You are free to share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

The full dataset as well as its information, authors and metadata can be accessed here.

Show the code
knitr::include_graphics("images/chuquicamata_cu_mine.jpg")

Chuquicamata Copper Mine, Chile, 2019

Fonte: Unplash.com

2 Data Import

Geoscience Australia, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the US Geological Survey compiled CMMI from publicly available sources, including mineral deposit, geochemistry, and the OSNACA databases.

The original dataset is divided into 340 columns showing Sample ID, Analytes, Limit of Detections, Countries, Coordinates, among other information, and 9513 rows.

3 Data Tidying and Data Filtering

For this analysis, we have four target elements: Copper (Cu), Gold (Au), Molybdenium (Mo), and Silver (Ag), exploring their distribution along the countries’ deposits.

So we need to filter the dataset prior to leave only the necessary information.

Show the code
copper <- tibble(cmmi_dataset$primary_commodities)

cmmi_americas <- cmmi_dataset |>
  dplyr::filter(country %in% c("MEX", "USA", "CAN", "BRA", "ARG", "CHL", "PER", "URY", "ECU", "COL")) |>
  dplyr::select(sample_name, primary_commodities, deposit_name, deposit_environment, country, 
                state, cu_ppm, cu_detection_limit, cu_method, 
                deposit_longitude_wgs84,deposit_latitude_wgs84)|>
  drop_na(cu_ppm)|>
  dplyr::filter(cu_ppm >= 50) |>
  mutate(country = countrycode(country, "iso3c", "country.name"))

4 Deposits’ Location

You may locate all the 712 deposits in the map below:

5 Copper grade distribution per country

Grade is one of the most important parameters to determine the value and the importance of a deposit. In the boxplot below, you can see the copper grade distribution per country.

Using country as id variables